Polygon, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol, has completed a hard fork successfully.
The primary reason for the upgrade is to minimize gas fees.
Polygon (MATIC), an Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol, has successfully completed a hard fork. The upgrade intends to address the network’s gas spike and chain reorganization issues (reorgs). As per Polygonscan data, the software was upgraded to Polygon PoS. In an Ethereum-compatible Proof-Of-Stake sidechain, on Jan 17 at 10:45 UTC (5:45 a.m. ET).
The Polygon PoS network has been upgraded 👏👏👏
To learn more about the upgrade, check out 👇https://t.co/RaBWDjEGrI pic.twitter.com/WiDOdJWzaK
— Polygon (@0xPolygon) January 17, 2023
In addition, two proposals contained in the hard fork was proposed in Dec. In fact, 87% of the polygon validator teams that participated went to get approval. Only 15 validator teams voted, which is extremely low given that the number of active validators at any given moment is limited to 100.
Upgrades of Polygon Hard Fork
Polygon first announced the hard fork in a blog post on January 12, which also revealed various long-term technical upgrades to polygon PoS. It will work on, promising scaling options such as parallelization and polygon zkEVM.
The upgrade was primarily required for frequent gas spikes, where the cost of conducting a transaction would exponentially increase during surges in network demand. And the fork intends to help reduce major fluctuations in gas pricing. And this hard fork-adjusted mechanism sets the gas fees with the purpose of keeping gas fees low when the network is active.
The second reason stated for the hard fork upgrade was to minimize the time it takes to complete a data block as part of an effort to prevent frequent reorgs. Which occur when a validator node receives information that temporarily generates a new version of the blockchain.
After the hard fork upgrade, the polygon native token MATIC token is traded at a price of $1.02. And has gained by over 3.1%.